The English Oracle

Etymology of 'doylum'

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Chapters
00:00 Etymology Of 'Doylum'
00:54 Answer 1 Score 4
01:38 Accepted Answer Score 10
02:15 Answer 3 Score 9
02:46 Answer 4 Score 1
02:59 Thank you

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ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 10


Yaron Matras, in his 2010 Romani in Britain: The Afterlife of a Language has this entry...

fool n. doylem ER dinilo; Yiddish goylem
(ER = European Romani)

From Wikipedia: in Modern Hebrew, golem is used to mean "dumb" or "helpless". Similarly, it is often used today as a metaphor for a brainless lunk...

The Yiddish origin is also given here, but that's a page on the University of Manchester's site, where Matras is a Professor of Linguistics. I believe him though, even if he's the only authority I can find.




ANSWER 2

Score 9


And yet another meritorious source:

Yorkshire Words Today : A Glossary of Regional Dialect (1997), page 41:

DOYLEM n simpleton (?derived from doychle) WR cf. EDD doychle Sc, also written doichle, 'a dull stupid person; a sloven', also 'to walk in a stupid, dreamy state'; cf. EDD entry for the West Country word doll, 'to talk foolishly, distractedly', and OED dolled, dollt, 'stupid; foolish, crazed; affected in mind'.




ANSWER 3

Score 4


There's also the spelling doylem. I shouldn't dabble in this one, but I will say that I find it interesting that Doyle stems from Irish Dubhghaill (ˈd̪ˠʊwəlʲ), dubh "black" + gall "stranger", and that that term was used by the Irish to desribe "new foreigners", who had darker skin than them and who arrived during Tudor conquest of Ireland [wiki]. In some languages, foreigners have been known to get a label "the mutes" by the locals, because they'd speak a language no one understood, and also they couldn't understand a word of the language of the locals. Another word for mute is dumb, which idiots are.

Edit:
Someone's given an up vote, do keep them coming, but bear in mind that this is hardly more than folk etymology.




ANSWER 4

Score 1


Interesting. I heard the tale on more than one occasion that doylem derived from a Batley-dwelling family named Doyle who carried on a notoriously delinquent lifestyle at some unspecified time in the past.